


Deep Things

by Soujin



Category: L'Île mystérieuse | The Mysterious Island - Jules Verne, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), Vingt mille lieues sous les mers | Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/M, Gen, Gender Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-14
Updated: 2012-10-14
Packaged: 2017-11-16 06:46:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/536644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Soujin/pseuds/Soujin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When her husband dies, she becomes him. Or not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Deep Things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gileonnen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/gifts).



> Nemo's real name -- Dakkar -- is taken from The Mysterious Island.

She finds that there is nothing unusual in his clothes. It was true that when she first put on his tunic and tied his sash around her waist, when she wound the long broad blue cloth of her turban around her cropped black hair, she had been afraid that she would weep. His clothes still smelled of him. But it became second nature after a while to rise in the morning and put on his clothes and walk through the hollow halls of his ship as if there had never been a moment when they traded places--as if she had always been him, and she had never existed to begin with.

It was true that once he had thumbed the part in her hair where the red paint disappeared subtly against her skin, and said, “How warlike you are,” on their wedding night. It was true that their children had loved her for the stories she told them of battles and justice and the heroes of India. But she watches now across the water for the dark bow of the ship to come within range, and her hand is perfectly steady on the wheel of the _Nautilus_.

“Captain,” Akal said at her elbow. “He wants to speak with you again.”

She scoffed. “Again?”

“He knows what you are doing, and he directed me to tell you that his heart is breaking.”

“I will not permit him to speak with me when I am working,” she said, smooth and final, like the closing of the sea above a sinking ship. Arronax was good company when he wanted to talk of science or mathematics or his work in Paris, but when he began to speak of morality and right and wrong and the purposeless of revenge, she hardened her heart like Pharaoh and kept him away.

“Are you ready?” Harker says at her elbow. Harker is straight-backed and tall, her neck still wrapped in a scarlet scarf.

“I have always been prepared,” she says.

“I suppose we had better give it to them, then.”

She had chosen the name because it took everything from her--country, sex, language, occupation. With that name she was no one. Even Akal, who was a clever man and certainly aware that his captain was not everything that he should be, by rights, would not have guessed exactly what the missing pieces were. She found that the Latin buried her dead children, her distant home. It was as easy to wipe them away as the bindi on her forehead.

Arronax knew she had secrets. She had been straightforward at least in that. Sometimes she thought that he was fair and honest enough, and enough kin to her in spirit, that she would permit him to know a little of her present (but never her past). He recognised that the pale spiral of narwhal tusk was built into the design of the ship, that she had taken everything from the sea because she had no other broker of goods, no habitat or environment, no homeland other than these coral fields and depthless canyons. She considered that, weighed it and balanced it against the fact that he was a civilised man, and she would have, eventually, to let him go. Then she kept her secrets.

Her hand is perfectly steady.

The impact rocks the _Nautilus_ , making it quiver down to the storerooms, thorough enough to feel beneath her feet. The spiral-cut spear at the helm is tearing through the soft steel of the ship above them. She knows it in her heart. She knows the size and shape of the ripped metal cavern, knows how it sounds when the sailors scream and shout and try to get their boats free in time to leave a few survivors.

She’ll bring the _Nautilus_ up first, and Sawyer will pick them off with his rifle.

“Nemo--!” Harker’s voice is like a small bell in an empty chamber, clear but followed by an echo. “Bring her around! For heaven’s sake, stop, we’ve got to pick up the men in the water.”

“Leave them. They’re only Englishmen.”

“They’re people!”

She can hear Arronax’s voice in Harker’s, the echo of the bell. She can hear Arronax’s French consonants, his swallowed r’s, and the strain on the word people that betokened his outrage. The only thing missing is the way Arronax made her question herself, for the only time in this life. He was the only one who gave her doubts.

He watched the fish through her window, the octopodes winding quick-footed across the glass, the sleek sharks that circled back curiously to stare at them inside. He read her notes and went over her careful sketches. He ate from her table and agreed to learn whatever she offered to teach him, and he repaid her by telling her, over and over, “They’re people.”

She knows they’re people. She has always known they were people.

That’s why she does it.

“Nemo! Bring the ship around!”

She looks at Harker with hard eyes, then turns the wheel. Arronax would be happy if he knew; but he won’t know. Perhaps Sawyer will shoot them anyway, and make the question moot. Perhaps she’ll have a revelation and put on this new guise of mercy as easily as her husband’s clothes.

At night she goes back to her room and unwinds the turban from her dark head. The cloth comes loose with a whisper, and suddenly she’s thinking of Arronax and Dakkar and her heart almost slips, her heart almost tumbles, loose like the cloth of a turban. But she catches it and puts it back.

She made herself no one. She doesn’t intend to change that now.


End file.
